


Steve and Bobbi Go Hiking

by MsMockingbird



Series: The Mockingverse [20]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Mockingbird (Comic), Mockingbird (Marvel) - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Other, Steve and Bobbi are Bros, Swearing, Torture, Wilderness Survival, period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-10-16 20:18:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10578744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsMockingbird/pseuds/MsMockingbird
Summary: When Steve and Bobbi are captured by unknown bad guys, they wind up in the wilderness, hiking to freedom.They spend a fair amount of time talking.





	1. Take Me To The River

They'd--he still wasn't sure who 'they' were--had figured out the perfect way to torture Captain America.

They hadn't touched him, after they'd chained him to the wall, heavily enough he couldn't move. If he'd been able to gather any momentum at all he might have been able to break free.

Would have when Mockingbird started screaming. They'd chained her up opposite him, nearly as heavily, and she'd joked that it was nice to be appreciated. She'd still been joking when they--men, in blank face masks and lots of weapons--unchained her with great care and attention to detail and pulled her out of the room, through the open door behind him that seemed to lead to a lab, all clinical and white. They'd both seen it as they were dragged in, still groggy and limp from the massive electrical jolt that had taken them both out.

They'd just been...hanging out, that was the shame of it. Not even in their uniforms, just jeans and t-shirts, walking around Brooklyn and chatting, shopping, eating small treats. Out of the Tower he got on with Bobbi better than anyone else, even Buck and Sharon in some ways. He had nothing to prove to the stick-fighter, nothing to maintain. No sexual tension, no tension at all, no worry. His sister in all but blood, who teased and tormented him and just loved him to death. Hell, they'd gotten into a playful shoving match over the artisan ice cream stall line up that had left him feeling like a goofy kid again.

Then this had happened and he wasn't even sure how long they'd been chained up for and the charge had shorted their trackers and their cell phones were gone. They'd dragged Bobbi back in after a some time and she was bleeding from long strips of flayed skin on both arms and he'd basically gone mental right then, snarling at the men.

They'd all filed out, leaving him staring at the unconscious blond woman, trying to figure out what they'd done to her and why and plotting terrible vengeance in his head. He wouldn't do any of it but he damn sure wanted to.

At some point Bobbi's chin came up. She had blood on her face--her own blood--and he could hear that her breathing was shallow, her heart racing. Her eyes focused slowly on him.

"I'm so sorry Steve," she whispered.

"What the..." he started to shout then forcibly modulated his tone. Don't yell at the woman who'd been tortured. "What the heck are you saying that for?"

"I tried not to scream. They kept telling me they'd stop when I screamed. So I tried not to but it turns out someone taking a filleting knife to your epidermis is more painful than I thought. They had to pour lemon juice on'em though. Before I yelled." 

"Is there a reason you didn't just start screaming right away? Before they cut you? I would have preferred that, okay?"

She snorted weakly. "Cause they'd still have done it and I'm not being complicit in assholes hurting you."

"Hurting me?"

"Yeah, sport, this is about you and we both know it. I heard the guys with the knives muttering your name, the '..gers...' sibilance is unmistakable."

"Then why aren't they torturing me?" he said. 

She laughed at him, hollowly. "I think they are, sport. They weaponized...me."

"We have to escape...wherever we are," he said some what desperately.

"Yeah, I know. I'm gonna pass out again now though so you'll have to work it on your own," she said weakly, then her head dropped to her chest with a thump.

At some point, about when Steve's bladder was starting to get annoyed with him the masked men came back and went straight for Mockingbird.

"Guys, come on, you're going to torture an unconscious woman how? Leave her be; I'll yell for you," Steve said desperately. They ignored him, unlocking the heavy chains a little less carefully, only one of them supporting her limp form.

Bobbi's head came up and she grabbed the edge of the man's mask in her teeth and ripped it off. Then she bit his face. He yelled, the first normal human noise any of them had made.

Despite the pain from her wounds and the hours she'd been bound, immobile, Bobbi moved fast. She head butted the guy holding her in the nose and he staggered back. When he dropped her she came up with a hand gun, so he must have had a concealed holster. Methodically, coolly, she shot the four men one at a time before they could react, each in the leg. Then she aimed the gun at Steve.

Her first two bullets hit anchor point of the ring holding his right hand to the wall and it sagged a little. It was enough. Just that tiny bit of slack gave Steve the opening he needed. He howled and ripped the anchor out of the wall. As Bobbi went from man to man knocking them out with the butt of the gun, he freed himself.

Panting they looked at each other. Bobbi bent down and took each man's gun, all the same. "No spare clips, they must have an armory here." She popped all the magazines out of the guns and pocketed them for the ammo, keeping the first gun she'd picked to hand . Then she swayed and nearly collapsed. "You should leave me, I'm basically Wil E Coyote right now, running on empty air."

"If they were just using you to get to me the best we could hope for then is more torture," Steve said, moving over to support her. She whimpered, which made him realize the open wounds on her arms were just the _last_ thing that had been done to her. "We're leaving. Too many to fight and I'm not going back to the Tower without you. You want me to catch an arrow with my face?"

"Where's your white horse, Lancelot?" she mumbled as Steve moved them both into the torture room. He made a glad noise when he saw both their jackets tossed haphazardly in a corner; it was fall and getting chilly. He pulled his on and draped hers over he shoulders, then wrapped an arm around her waist again. Two other doors lead out of the room, he randomly went to the left one. Bathroom. He opened the other onto an empty corridor. As they went through the door they heard the sound of pounding feet behind them.

"Can you run?" Steve said.

"No. But I will," Bobbi responded, her voice manic. She pushed away and began to run down the hallway, looking like she was walking compared to her usual speed and power. Steve followed behind her, his hands out in case she fell. By unspoken agreement they turned left at every junction, moving fast enough that the pursuit was still a turn or two behind them. Suddenly the corridors ran out, bursting them into the atrium of a decrepit hotel, all bare logs, broken furniture, dust and deer antlers. Outside they could see pine forest and a large river spinning away from them to the left.

No cars or any other conveyance to steal.

Shouting erupted from the balcony above them. They both charged for the door Bobbi shooting randomly over her shoulder as she did. Steve put his head down and smashed the front door open like a linebacker. More faceless men started to pour around the sides of the building.

Steve spun, snatched Bobbi into his arms and sprinted for the river.

"Oh, you asshole Rogers!" he heard her yell as he leapt from the banks into the middle of the raging water. The cold closed around him as tightly as the chains; he convulsively tightened his grip on Bobbi, pulling her head down into his neck. 

They were swept away.


	2. Sticks and Stones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Free of their captors, Steve and Bobbi are now lost in the forest with no weapons, food or way to contact help.
> 
> Worse, Steve has to take his shirt off.

Bobbi was unconscious when Steve dragged them out of the river. He was shaking with cold and fatigue, his superhuman metabolism burning through his blood sugar like an arsonist. He had to get them some where and make a fire.

He looked around. The river had widened and flattened as it exited a gorge, which is why he'd been able to stand. Carrying Bobbi, he staggered up the muddy bank into the cover of the trees. Then he gathered himself and leapt backwards into the river, leaving his trail intact. He swam/stumbled to the other side, where the bank of the river rose a little higher and he could see outcroppings of stone amidst the trees. Picking his way as carefully as he could he got them up the bank and under cover. A game trail, spottily over grown, opened in front of him and he used its relative clear state to make good progress away from the river and the inevitable pursuit. But night was falling, they were both soaked to the bone and it was getting cold.

They needed shelter, and now.

A wall of granite thrust up in front of him, the trail turning to run along its base. And there, a few hundred meters away, a cave mouth.

If he had to fight a bear for it, so be it.

The cave was blissfully empty of anything but a pile of dried deadfall and scattered rocks. He laid Bobbi down at the back of the small concave and ventured out into the forest again. He picked up a very dry log over one shoulder and hurried back. Bobbi was motionless and in the fading light her lips looked blue with cold.

Steve arranged the log--after breaking it in half with a kick--against the side wall of the space, where the ceiling flared out and up a little. Then he picked up one of the sturdier pieces of deadfall and placed it in a divot on one side of the log.

The thing about his enhanced muscles is that they made using sticks to start a fire a breeze. In a few minutes he had one log burning merrily. The smoke pooled and collected but slowly seeped out of the entrance. In the gloom it would be mostly invisible.

The next problem was their clothing. Soaking wet it provided no protection.

He pulled off his jacket and shirt, then his jeans, finding or making outcroppings in the ceiling of the cave where he could hang them to drip dry. They would also conceal the light of the fire and help hold warmth inside the space. Despite his relative resistance to environmental distress he _hated_ being cold with every fiber of his being and shivering in a cave in his underwear was something of a nightmare scenario for him.

He hesitated only a moment before stripping Bobbi to her underwear too, forcibly willing himself not to look at anything his mother would have slapped him for looking at. In the lining of her jacket, bless her paranoid little heart, he found a cache of their special ration bars, twenty in total. She and Bruce made them up personally, packed with protein and vitamin supplements. The interior tasted like candy, sometimes peppermint, sometimes peanut butter or fudge and the exterior was coated thickly with dark chocolate. They had some ungodly calorie count.

There were other things in the lining, he can feel pouches and bottles and metal but it was the food that mattered right now.

He ate four of them without pausing to breathe and instantly felt better, his head clearing. He took her borrowed gun out of her jacket pocket--and when had she had the presence of mind to zip it away like that, hell when had she gotten the jacket _on_ \--and set it out where either of them could reach it, but away from the fire. Then he set the jacket itself as far away from the fire he could get, in case she had explosives in there.

He hung her clothes up too, after ducking back out in his underwear to rip up a bundle off moss off the forest floor. He ran back inside, spread it out on the floor near the fire and laid Bobbi in her pink bra and panties on top. The little space was smoky but already noticeably warmer. Steve arranged a bunch of rocks to the open side of his fire, to absorb and bounce back some of the heat and lay down next to Bobbi. He pulled her into his arms, trying to cover as much of her from the air as possible. With the food in his system his super charged metabolism would heat him up from the inside.

What he could see in the dim, flickering light of the fire made him hopeful she might be okay from their dunk in the freezing river. There was a flush to her cheeks and her lips were pale but no longer blue. However, now he could see a crazed mass of bruises on her torso as well as the scabbed but still weeping flayed strips on her arms. She might have broken bones from the way she'd been moving. A surge of rage filled him. They'd hurt her to hurt him and it had worked but now--he'd have been less mad if they'd vivisected him.

Steve put his head down, tucking her into his neck and despite his best intentions, fell asleep.

He woke up in the full darkness outside and the dim embers of his logs, Bobbi still nestled against his chest. He heard her sigh.

"Thanks, sport," she whispered, then coughed, a dry hacking noise. "Think I might have caught a spot of the chill but you know, not dead. So that's a good thing."

He fished around a second and located the re-sealable ration bar package. He extracted one that smelt of peppermint to him, her favorite. Breaking off one end he tucked a piece of it into her mouth. She sighed again and chewed a little, slowly, as though her jaw hurt. He ate a chunk of the bar himself waiting for her. Bit by bit he hand fed about a quarter of the food to her then ate the rest himself when she shook him off. She made a weak little noise and her head drooped against his arm and she was asleep again. He followed her down into sleep, feeling a weird warmth in the pit of his stomach that had nothing to do with sex. He was doing the thing he'd been told from his childhood that a man was supposed to do: protect the people he loved.

*****

Steve woke up to astonishingly loud birdsong, millions of the little bastards, shrieking their hearts out. The fire had been banked but the little cave was almost cozy with retained heat. Next to the fire his rough dried jeans were sitting, neatly folded. He pulled them on lying down then shimmied out of the cave, past the barrier of their jackets. Bobbi's was stripped to the leather on the inside. His boots and hers were resting in the sun, turned upside down and laces splayed open.

Bobbi was sitting fully dressed on a pile of rocks with a roll of fabric spread out in front of her. She was wrapping her arm wounds in white fabric. As he emerged she looked up and smiled widely, then her face got that 'ima be naughty' look he associated with her and Clint doing stuff on TV to make him crazy. She looked him up and down and whistled between her teeth. "We need to do that charity calendar Steve. You shirtless and barefoot in tight jeans? We could charge thousands."

He grimaced at her. "Don't be disrespectful. Also, you stole my shirt what was I supposed to do?"

She winced. "Sorry. I don't put bandages in the emerg pack, not water proof. I had to cut strips off your shirt bottom cause mine's a blend and yours is pure cotton." She tossed him the slightly shorter shirt and he put it on. She made a disappointed noise. 

"Shut up," he said comfortably. "There are ticks out here." In response she threw him a small spray bottle from her kit. 

"Spray on insect repellent. Should last until we take another bath. Make sure you get the bottom of those gorgeous gams."

He rolled his eyes her but gave his shins and bare feet a good hit before putting his boots on. "That shirt was filthy Bobbi. I really don't want you losing your arms to an infection. I'm not sure Tony can build you new ones."

She laughed, easy and clear. "Bucky and I can swap out parts!"

He laughed too and despite it all, despite the pain and fear and uncertainty, for a moment standing in the forest laughing with this woman felt good and right and true. 

Still grinning she grabbed the end of the strip of cloth in her teeth and made a neat reef knot against the inside of her arm, matching the one on the other side.

"The kit has sterilizing solution for just such an emergency, hence the not bothering to pack bandages."

"Lemme see what you got there," he said, hopping lightly on the rock next to her. She spread the thick nylon lining of her jacket out between them. 

It was gorgeously laid out, with little pockets and straps concealed inside the double layers so cleverly it would lie flat and not bulge or move or make noises.

Several knives, throwing and utility and camping. Ceramic too, so they wouldn't set off metal detectors. Bottles of drugs--he noticed the 'antibiotics', 'analgesic' and 'decongestant' were all open and he nodded approvingly. Nothing electronic so no radio or phone, because they were traceable and she was covert ops after all. Fishing line--which could double as a garrote. Magnifying glass. Water purification tabs. Matches. What proved to be a collapsible water bottle. First aid supplies. 

"I wish," she sighed, "I could fit a compass and mirror in there but too bulky or too much metal."

"I wish I'd had you around on the Eastern Front," he said admiringly. "Also, you were a Scout right? Always prepared?"

"I grew up in the Philippines and do I look 'Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.'?" 

Steve cocked his head. "You're a...couple of those. Well, one."

"Obedient, right?"

"That's exactly what I was thinking."

They both fell about giggling. 

Bobbi hopped down and retrieved her boots and their jackets. "I'll make sure the fire is totally out, grab us some water from the river."

Steve sighed. "As much as I'd like to stay put, the odds are the bad guys are closer to finding us than the team."

"Agreed, sport. Who's up for a hike?"


	3. Your Soul is Not a Measuring Cup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Walking and talking, walking and talking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...there is talk of 'icky chick stuff' here. FYI
> 
> Also, mention of rough (consensual) sex and a concerns about domestic violence

Without talking to each other they started walking directly away from the river, trailing the ridge that had housed their cave. The river was a trap: as the obvious and direct escape route their unknown captors would be most likely to be searching it intensely. If the Avengers had a motto other than "Assemble!" it was "assume your enemy is smarter and better organized than you are". Bobbi was walking well when they started out, due to the painkillers coursing through her system but as they moved further and further away from the cave she began to slow. 

They had been walking long enough in silence that the sun had moved to noonish from early morning when Bobbi suddenly turned to Steve and spoke. 

"You're not walking behind me to look at my ass, I have it on good authority you're a breast guy." She studied him with narrowed eyes, her lips twitching when his cheeks reddened just a little. 

Steve spread his hands. "If you fall, I catch you." 

"I look that unsteady?" 

"Bobbi, you're a day from being beaten and tortured because of me. Just because you're not feeling as much pain doesn't mean you're all right," he said patiently. Then he smiled and the sun got measureably brighter around him, a golden halo of sincerity and concern. 

She blew her cheeks out at him. "You're younger than I am. How do you _do_ that?" 

That was such a common refrain from her to him that he didn't even answer it anymore, just smiled and gestured them back into motion. But they talked now, as they walked. 

"Well, no, I'm not that great at wilderness survival," Bobbi said during a rest stop, drinking a carefully measured amount of purified water before handing the half-empty canteen off to him. By virtue of superhuman strength and stamina and unconscious sexism that the both acknolwdged by laughing at it Steve was carrying both their coats. "My idiom is the urban jungle. It actually broke up a relationship of mine." 

"How many exs do you have?" Steve said with a grin. 

"Ha, fewer than Nat or Clint, sport. Ka-Zar was cute--frankly, he was gorgeous--but I'm not built for jungle tree houses as a lifestyle." 

"Jungle? Treehouses?" 

"It was a little Greystoke Legend of Tarzan-y." She declined to explain with a cheeky grin. 

Steve laughed and shook his head. "Ah, well, we all have our little secrets." He took a swig of the water himself and then stood up, stretching. "Do you know what kind of predators they have out here at least? Thankfully we don't have to worry about you getting your period anyway. It can attract bears." 

Bobbi, who had been standing up when he spoke, nearly pitched forward onto her face in surprise. "The hell Steve!" 

"What?' He had grabbed her shoulder when she started and was holding her up. "Am I wrong?" 

She sputtered at him. "No, you're...I...dude, I know exactly zero men who would just say something like that..." 

"You know one, obviously," he said in a mild voice. "And not even Clint?" 

"Well, now, yes but he used to do that stupid squeamish euphemism dance around it. Took a while to break him of it but he thought it was polite so..." She looked up at him, into his pale beautiful face. He looked calm and serene, perhaps a little amused. "When'd you figure it out? That we weren't?...Took Clint three months and I was _sleeping_ with him." 

"Month after you showed up. Noticed it with Natasha first," he said, still unruffled and unembarrassed. They were walking again, picking through the thinner trees closer to the ridge. "Look, I wasn't always doing the charge into battle thing in WWII. We--the Commandos, Buck and I--worked with Maquis, the Polish Resistance, other groups. Lots of them were women and we all just...it was something they had to live with and so did we and I cracked down on any of the guys who acted like it was unclean or embarrassing. Those women suffered and fought and died like any other soldier. I wasn't going to let anyone treat them like pariahs because of something natural. There was enough blood around from worse sources, you know?" He turned and smiled at her over his shoulder, having taken the lead a moment. "Peggy told me she was proud of me about it so I figured I was doing right." 

Bobbi shook her head, her face incredulous and her eyes a little wet. "Steven Rogers, you never cease to amaze me. Bless your heart and all your other bits, yes, you did right. And thank you for the ammo, Bucky's never going to know what hit him on this one." 

Steve snorted, loudly. 

"But as to the rest," she continued, "I am still a biochemist. It's not difficult to pause menstruation. Just need the right hormones in the right proportions. Even more than a little argument that its healthier for some women. I've been making my own personalized cocktail for years, when I had access to the raw materials. Offered it to Nat right away. Hill, Jane, Pepper, Jemma and Sharon -- all of them now too. I can't really scale up--it's artisanal blood work, adjusted to be both healthy for and easy on each body. Jarvis has the formulas now, and they generate automatically in the lab but I still have to test and tweak them sometimes. One shot a month." 

"That's kind of you," Steve said. 

“The longer I live the more I think that’s the point of life. Be kind. Be brave. Be just. Laugh. Love.” She smiled at him, and her voice dropped a little. They picked their way down a little hill, and Bobbi suffered Steve grasping her by the waist and lifting her down the last part of the drop. “People seem to think their soul is a measuring cup, right? They have to dole out love by the teaspoon full, for fear of running out. That’s the way I lived my life, for so long.”

“Till you met Clint,” Steve said, looking up to judge the angle of the sun.

“Till I met you, sport”

It was Steve’s turn to stumble and nearly fall. He turned back to her to see her leaning on a tree, her face grave. 

“If I didn’t have you, Steve. And Nat. And the team—then yes, Clint would be my only love. And I’m dumb enough, and needy enough, that I’d have turned him into my life top to bottom. Which might have ended us. But you know, I love you as much as I love him. So, obviously the theory is flawed, right?” She paused and an evil grin spread across her face. “I’m still not going to fuck you, though.”

Steve made gagging noises and they both laughed. Bobbi stepped up to him, taking one of his hands in hers.

“Your soul isn’t a measuring cup. It’s a river. The more love you give, the more love their is in the world, to get taken up by everything else. Once I realized that, life got so much better.” 

Steve reached out and laid his free hand on her face and she responded by pulling him in, until their foreheads touched. 

A few hundred yards down the game trail a clearing widened out, with a creek running through it. They sat down on the moss to filter some water. Steve picked up a few rocks and shied them idly at trees until he cut one sapling in half accidentally. 

“Bobbi?” 

“Hmm?” She said, her eyes half-closed.

“Can I ask you something really personal?” 

“Sure.”

“If Clint ever hit you, you’d tell me right?”

Her eyes sprung open like she’d been goosed.

“The heck Steve?” She exclaimed, shoving herself onto her hands.

“You’d tell me, right?” He sat up with his legs crossed and stared at her steadily. 

“You mean I’d tell you why I just threw him off the Tower?”

He cocked his head. “When I grew up there were men who hit their wives, daughters. Like it was their right. And they took it, like it was their fault. They weren’t weak women. They weren’t fools. They just loved their families, their children, the community, their husband even still, and they thought it was their duty to be a punching bag. I know how much you love him. You’d tell me, right?”

She studied him back. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because last month when you came down to briefing you were in long sleeves and they rode up and I saw the damn hand-shaped bruises is why. And then I remembered I’ve seen them before, a few months after you got married and I thought it was from sparring or combat. But they were the same last month and we hadn’t been in a fight in forever.” He leaned forward, placing his hand flat on the ground between them. “You’d tell me, right?”

She stared at him, her teeth clenched. “This isn’t…damn it. It’s not really my secret to tell but…what’s the first thing you’d ascribe to both Clint and I? Like, you think about us together and what’s the first thing you see us doing?”

“Laughing,” he shot back.

“Right!” She pointed at him. “Everyone thinks that. Thinks we’re these happy-go-lucky jokesters, never serious. Except…Clint and I are really _alike_ Steve. Really alike. And the thing we both are isn’t cheerful. It’s ANGRY.”

Steve rocked back a little a stared at her. 

“Bruce’s got nothing on us, let me tell you,” she continued, heatedly. “He can let go, literally let his anger take over. Clint and I have always had to suppress ours. And usually it works but sometimes…sometimes it’s just this living thing in your chest, gnawing at the inside of you breast bone, this red burning in your brain and you need to hurt something, you need to do something…” She surged to her feet, pacing with sharp motions. “Sex and violence are so close to each other, Steve. Same hormones. Sometimes it gets the best of Clint and that’s when I…we…it’s rough sex, yeah. But it’s _consensual_ and it bleeds the poison out of him.”

“Okay,” Steve said simply. “But you’d tell me, right?”

“Are you part pit bull?”

“You’d tell me, right?”

“Yes, I’d tell you!” She threw her hands in the air.

“I just wanted to be sure,” he said in a mild voice. “Also, you two are the weirdest married couple I’ve ever known.”

“We get on, frozen boy scout. We get on.”

They walked till night fell, then spooned in the lee of a fallen tree, covered in one of the silvery survival blankets from her pack. Despite everything, Steve felt this huge, warm contentment. 

Every hour they trekked without their captors finding them decreased the odds of the them being found exponentially. And they could walk till they found civilization, even if it took a week or more. 

And he was enjoying talking to her. Outside of the battlefield, when he felt like they were in perfect sync, she was something of a mystery to him. She could catch him off guard with reactions and ideas and decisions. 

He liked it but it wasn’t _comfortable_. 

And despite not having an ounce of sexual designs on her, having a strong, warm female body pressed up against him—sweaty and dirty yes, but not rank—was a pleasurable thing. 

They were seven hours of walking into their third day in the woods when the grizzly attacked them.


	4. Bear!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bear!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The grizzly bear (Ursus arctos), is a large subspecies of brown bear inhabiting North America….including the mainland grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis)…adult males weigh on average 180–360 kg (400–790 lb)._
> 
> _Average total length in this subspecies is 198 cm (6.50 ft)…an occasional huge male grizzly has been recorded which greatly exceeds ordinary size, with weights reported up to 680 kg (1,500 lb) A large coastal male of this size may stand up to 3 metres (9.8 ft) tall on its hind legs and be up to 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) at the shoulder._

Steve shinnied down the big deciduous tree in a few deft motions, landing next to Bobbi light as a feather. 

“No sign of pursuit or rescue,” he remarked. She looked up from her arm bandages, one of them already peeled off and the other half way. Out in the open, the wounds looked ugly, scabbed and bloody, but no longer raw. The strips of his shirt were stiff with dried blood.

Carefully she wrapped up both bandages when they were off and sighed. The corners of her eyes crinkled up with pain. “I need to wash these out if we find a stream. Otherwise right now I’m better off giving my skin a little air.”

“Use the antibiotics again, please,” Steve prompted. 

“Yes, mom. But you need to eat a couple of the ration bars,” she countered. 

He pulled out the pack and handed her a chunk of the last peppermint one. He ate two peanut butter himself under her watchful eye. They debated a moment on direction and decided to continue as best they could eastward. The terrain was getting more mountainous, but they were mostly going down hill not up, which was a good sign. 

Steve thankfully had a preternatural sense of direction, mostly due to his super senses and perfect inner ear. Small deviataions in terrain registered fast and he corrected without thinking. 

By now they were chatting most of the time, telling each other stories of their respective lives before they met. Steve talked about the war a little, about Romania and a man calling himself Vlad; Bobbi countered with stories of Sharon. Agents 13 and 19 had often been paired up in the field, despite Fury trying to keep Mockingbird away from Hawkeye and Black Widow. But Bobbi and Sharon could have been sisters easily and often posed as such. Though Bobbi dropped hints that there were a female pair of white Russian weapons dealers ‘known’ to be lovers lurking in the background.

Steve filed that away for later Sharon-baiting. 

If it hadn’t been for the wounds on her arms, and the fact that by now they had both conceded she had at least 1 cracked rib, he’d be enjoying himself. It was almost peaceful, this hike, this company even knowing they could be thrust into desperate combat any second if their captors found them, of course. And they were ready for that. 

They were not, as it turned out, ready for the side of the hill they were carefully traversing to collapse.

Steve felt the ground shift under his feet and lunged at Bobbi in the same instant. When he grabbed her from behind she tucked her head into his neck, half spinning on her heel. The dirt and rocks they were picking across melted into a cascade of debris, pinging off Steve’s arms and back, off his head and face. But he held her tight, curling his legs up to protect her.

Something big and solid punching him in the side, a stab of pain and the sensation of hot water being thrown on him letting him know he was cut. He tightened his grip on Bobbi, forcing her head closer to his chest. He could survive a head injury; she might not. 

They spun in a roar of falling trees and roiling dirt; rocks and sticks bounced off Steve’s skull, making him dizzy. Bobbi cried out in pain.

Then it was over. 

They were partially covered in loose soil and Steve heaved it off them like a dog shaking off water.

Bobbi had blood on the side of her head where something had cut her above her damaged ear. She was gasping, which is when Steve realized he’d been holding her awfully tightly. 

She pushed away from him, gulping air, then looked up. Her face crinkled in dismay as her eyes roamed down his torso. “Don’t move. You’re impaled on a fucking branch.”

Steve held still as her fingers tapped against his ribs, sending barbs of hot agony shivering up his chest. 

“Your myosin is like steel cable thankfully; it got hung up on your transverse abdominals as opposed to your large intestine. Hang on.” One firm, strong hand took hold of the branch and pulled it out, sending a fresh wash of blood down his side. Bobbi grabbed her jacket, that somehow Steve had kept hold of, feverishly pulling out the first aid kit. “Don’t move, gotta get that cleaned out before you start to heal with little bits of wood in you.”

Several wincing, hissing passes later with wooden tweezers and alcohol swabs, plus most of their water, and his wound was clean. She spread it with anti-biotic and carefully taped a bandage over it. 

Steve smiled at her wanly. Her face was pale, blood dried on one cheek and along her collarbone. The wound on her left arm was open again but her right had been jammed against his chest so it was okay. She smiled back, her lip trembling a little, then looked up into the sky.

“Now would be a good time Hawkeye,” she said in an expectant voice, then sighed. “Dude never manages to rescue the princess when she really needs it.”

Steve stood up and pulled her to her feet. “The princess is pretty capable of rescuing herself I think. And what am I chopped liver?

Looking back up the quite impressive distance they had fallen, the large rocks and uprooted trees around them, Bobbi shook her head. “We were nearly s-s-s-s-salsa. As in a fine red paste. Thank you.” She was shaking a little, adrenaline and other hormones cycling out of her system.

“Hey, come’er,” he said pulling her into his chest. He held her till he felt her shoulder muscles stop spasming then let her go. “On the upside, look—” he pointed towards a loop of the river, just visible through the tree line. “Running water and a clearing.”

They filled one of the survival blankets with water, which _of course_ she knew the correct volume of for the purifier and proceeded to rinse and wash the blood off of both their wounds. 

Steve was dipping his arm back into the distinctly pink water when a strange sound caught his attention.

It was more….vibration than anything else. Vibration and the occasional grunt…

He looked up the river bank and saw—with surreal clarity—that they were being charged full speed by a grizzly bear.

“Well,” said Bobbi in a faint voice. “You were right about the blood.”

And it was on them.

Steve threw himself backwards, towards the water. Bobbi dove sideways, towards the trees. Those actions probably saved them both, putting enough distance between them that the huge bear got confused about its target for just a moment.

The great brown thing, the tips of his fur frosted silver, reared up onto his hind legs. HIs blocky muzzle opened in a roar of rage and hunger and even with the fear hammering through him, his heart slamming into his breast bone, Steve’s artist brain grabbed the image and held it in his minds eye.

He _had to_ paint this primal thing, this force of nature. 

But he had to survive first.

The great beast turned his head from one of them to the other, his massive body flowing along behind it like a wave of muscle. His claws, black and as long as Steve’s hand, flared from his paws as he dropped down to all fours and then reared back up, roaring again. His beady eyes centered on Steve.

A flash of blond hair darted between them.

Steve forced every molecule of air out of his lungs in a shout of “No!’ But not even that could have stopped Mockingbird in full flight.

She sprinted forward two steps, dropped into a hook slide in the sand of the river bank and …

…kicked the grizzly bear in the balls as she slid through his legs.

For a long breathless instant it would have been hard to tell who was more surprised, Steve or the bear.

Steve recovered first.

As the grizzly bear started to drop back down to all fours, intent now on the little golden thing that had hurt it, Steve Rogers surged forward, planted his feet and threw the biggest, most telegraphed uppercut of his life.

To protect Mockingbird, Steve Rogers punched a grizzly bear.

The punch landed square on the big animal’s chin, sending it crashing sideways to the ground. Mockingbird surged up behind it, dodging around its thrashing legs, and grabbed Steve’s arm.

“Come on!” She yelled.

“It’s down though,” Steve said in a confused voice. 

“Those have been the last words of a lot of grizzly shit!” She hissed, dragging him around.

They barely got three paces before that huge, demented roar sounded again. Bobbi slipped on loose gravel and went down, pulling Steve with her. They both rolled and came up half-crouched, to see the grizzly rise up one more time, black and terrible against the bright sky. 

And then the sound of a swarm of angry bees.

The grizzly froze and slowly, slowly, toppled sideways…

….revealing in the very far distance the image of the Avenger’s quinjet racing towards them. 

Dangling from the cargo hatch was the Winter Solider, his mechanical arm locked tight to a ring in the door and suspended by a combat harness from his other hand Hawkeye, his hands coming back from the moment of release on the tranquilizer arrow now embedded in the grizzly’s spine. 

Bobbi blinked at the image, then turned to Steve.

“You punched a bear,” she said in an even tone.

“You kicked it in the junk.”

So it was that when the quinjet landed, and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye leapt out and ran to their nearest and dearest, they found Steve and Bobbi wrapped around each other, laughing hysterically. 

The two marksmen stopped a near the now snoring bear and just stared for a bit. Then Bucky shoved Clint’s arm.

“I say we leave’em,” he muttered.

“Rogers, sure. I’m taking the woman though,” Hawkeye responded. 

Bobbi wiped her eyes on Steve’s shoulder and looked up. “Hell, we’re taking the damn bear, sport. They’re not native to this area. I think the poor thing escaped from an illegal hunting operation. We are NOT leaving it behind.”

Steve stood up and pulled her with him. “I bet that’s why it attacked us. Not able to hunt. We’re definitely not leaving it.”

Clint turned to Bucky. “All three of them can stay, sure.”

*****

An hour or so later, with a peacefully sleeping grizzly bear in a cargo net dangling from the belly of the quinjet, Steve and Bobbi sat side by side on one of the gurneys as the Winter Soldier finished bandaging them. Bucky had turned out to be an exceptional combat medic and even muttered like Bruce did so it was very comforting. 

Clint was stroking Bobbi’s hair; Sam was flying the jet.

“So, yeah, we tracked the guys who grabbed you to an abandoned ski resort upstate; they were like a kicked ant hill when we showed,” Clint was saying. “They got super talkative after a few passes from Iron Man and War Machine and we’ve been quartering the woods for the two of you since.”

“Who are they?” Steve asked, rubbing at his side fretfully. 

“You remember that Romany encampment in Bohemia, in 43?” Bucky asked.

“Yeah?” Steve responded.

“They were the descendants of those scum bags. They had a secret society dedicated to ‘destroying the Howling Commandos’.”

Steve blinked at his oldest friend. “Did they ever manage—?”

“Not even once. Until now.”

“They were Roma?” Bobbi said incredulously.

“No,” Steve shook his head. “We stopped a mob of fascists from killing a mixed family group of Roma, during the war. It was one of the times I felt really okay breaking bones.”

“Anyway, they’re in jail now. So, like father like great-grandson I guess,” Bucky finished, setting his last stitch into Steve’s side. He stepped back and nodded, firmly. 

“Agreed,” said Steve, then gently slugged Bobbi on the shoulder. “And we got to talk, so it wasn’t all bad.”

The look of pure, abject terror on Bucky and Clint’s faces was worth the entire ordeal.


End file.
